Capcom, Cheating, & The DRM

[cshotgspot]

I don't interact with the community much, but, considering I might have caused Capcom to fast-track their DRM to Revelations, I feel like I need to tell this story somewhere and I'm sorry.

This is a very long story with technical details regarding raid mode, but hopefully it will make sense, or at the very least, highlight Capcom's point of view. First things first, I've never cheated or installed mods for this game. But Capcom (and maybe some players) think I do.

Let's start at the beginning. Capcom's ResidentEvilNet service hosts online events where people can obtain extra rewards for reaching ranks or go for the top score. About 2 years ago, I decided to start going for the top score on a few events. At the time, I didn't really think much of it, and I didn't think it'd last long because I was working full-time (often more) and someone could just play more than me to easily win the top spot.

Fast forward maybe 8-12 months. This game is pretty dead. I started collecting the event top score weapons and looking into ways to optimise gaining score to continue winning in less time. One of those events was the Wanted Challenge. I'm going to skip over the discovery portion and stick to the score rates for the sake of time. Eventually, I figured out a way to continuously replay a stage by taking the Wanted enemies of a second account.

Normally, people would play Ghost Ship or Chasm S20 for about an hour to accumulate wanted enemies, before ultimately defeating them on Abyss S10-S20. This was about 25 score per hour. My new strategy ended up at something like 190 per hour because I could strictly eliminate enemies on the fastest stage. Put another way, someone playing 24 hours a day could still lose to me playing only ~3 hours, so I barely had to play to win. To my surprise, this wasn't documented anywhere, and it wasn't even against the rules either. The rules explicitly state that there are no character, weapon, parts, stage, or players, or difficulty restrictions, so as unintended this might be, (there are more rules but none of them really apply) this was the new meta. Only a few players knew about it.

And then nothing really happened. I was working maybe 60 hours per week and nobody else wanted to compete because the rewards aren't great. In December, I had more free time than usual and decided to go for my personal goal of being the first person to reach 10,000 and overshot to 15,000. This score isn't possible at 25 score per hour and caught the attention of Capcom, who promptly removed it. After the event concluded, I noticed it was gone when I didn't receive any event rewards.

I emailed Capcom support, hoping to clear things up, emphasising that I'm missing my rewards and the score is legitimate. However, Capcom has a reputable for poor customer service. Brace yourself. After confirming my information, they banned me. I think I caught the attention of someone higher up, because these weren't copy and paste sample responses. They didn't even care to clarify a new rule to restrict the strategy, or reimburse any site rewards. The exact words are "we have confirmed that your data contains information that cannot be obtained through normal play" and "from the standpoint of fairness with other players" I am "no longer able to participate." Very few people can say they were banned for being too good at the game, but I am one of them.

That's a neat story (and I'm still banned), but how does this affect the DRM, you might ask? Well, if you're Capcom, you just watched as the last ~2 years of events "cheated" other players out of their rewards undetected. The best part is, another winning score of 7,000, using the exact same strategy, remains; it was only the fact the scores started getting so ridiculous near the end that they removed it. If the new strategy was truly the culprit, both would be gone. I never cheated; I've never installed mods for this game, and I didn't break the event rules. It's a private company, and they can choose to remove my account in their ToS, even if I'm a legitimate user.

It might just be a coincidence and I'm overthinking things. I can't help but think Capcom sees this as a player that managed to slip-by the cracks and win a bunch of events, so they rushed their DRM implementation to combat "cheating." Other games are getting the same treatment, yet, with the Chinese language removal and other issues, it seems like this game in particular was more rushed than usual.

tl;dr = Capcom banned and effectively accused me of cheating when I never did. It might sound weird to think I caused them to rush their DRM implementation, but in their eyes I went undetected for years, taking top event rewards from other players.

[Dam Stark]

I'm sure they view cheating the same as modding. Online multiplayer should be a separate component to single-player offline content. I think they just add it to any new patches for whatever game they decide to update (like re5 with the gfwl removal) or to any game after removing Denuvo.

[pizDuke]

If that were the case they should've only implementated drm for those who have residentevilnet account. On the other hand it's Californian Capcom we're talking about so anything is possible.

[Milkdust]

I really hope Capcom isn't THAT stupid.

[EvathCebor]

So, Capcom is exactly as stupid as they sound, it seems.

[cshotgspot]

Originally posted by Sleezure:

I really hope Capcom isn't THAT stupid.

I mean... I'm still banned, and the strategy is public knowledge now. You can get two accounts or find someone else and farm the event just like I did; there's no competitive advantage that puts me ahead "from the standpoint of fairness with other players." I just had a couple extra days off and decided to play Revelations for two weeks, and the next thing you know, the WR and my rewards are gone. I can't participate any more, and pretty much stopped playing.

Originally posted by EvathCebor:

So, Capcom is exactly as stupid as they sound, it seems.

From their PoV, my scores are "cheated" but went undetected for years, so I think this DRM is another added step to prevent players looking into things to find something similar. In reality, it's just a new strategy to play the event. Like I mentioned in the OP, it really does seem like it got the attention of higher ups because someone actually looked into the play data.

[Scrubwave]

Originally posted by Dam Stark:

I'm sure they view cheating the same as modding.

Because they sell both cheats and skins. They can't sell that if you can cheat on your own and get better skins with mods.

[Lanzagranadas]

Originally posted by Scrubwave:

Because they sell both cheats and skins. They can't sell that if you can cheat on your own and get better skins with mods.

Yeah, pretty ironic from a company that not only included some form of cheating (like infinite ammo) in nearly every RE game, but even currently sell shortcuts to those cheats as "DLC".